Review/Theater; Shakespeare in the Wild West, in the Park

By FRANK RICH

Published: July 13, 1990

If Cole Porter and company could transplant ''The Taming of the Shrew'' to sedate, late 1940's Baltimore, why can't the New York Shakespeare Festival let Kate and Petruchio have their standoff in the wild, late 19th-century West? A. J. Antoon's rambunctious production of Shakespeare's comedy, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, turns out to be its own best argument. With Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman, a theoretically unlikely yet entirely winning couple, at center stage, the entertainment is consistently more engaging than it may sound on paper. Were Mr. Antoon's ''Shrew'' a musical, it would be too broad to be ''Kiss Me Kate'' perhaps, but it could happily pass for ''Annie Get Your Gun.''

As he proved in the 1970's with his radiant Teddy Roosevelt-era ''Much Ado About Nothing'' in Central Park, and more recently with his Bahia ''Midsummer Night's Dream,'' the inaugural show of Joseph Papp's Shakespeare Marathon, Mr. Antoon does not settle for merely dreaming up new settings for Shakespeare's comedies; he carries out his schemes to the finest details. Even before an actor appears in ''Shrew,'' the audience takes in John Lee Beatty's high-spirited Main Street set, a Hollywood-backlot facade decorated with a mock-Remington mural of stampeding horses, and watches some tumbleweeds dance about to a musical score (by Claude White) reeking of manifest destiny in the ''Bonanza'' key.

For all the chaps, buckskins and spurs of Lindsay W. Davis's costumes and cumulus clouds of Peter Kaczorowski's lighting scheme, Mr. Antoon's staging soon proves more than a matter of fine decorative touches. While the director has rewritten and cut some of Shakespeare's text (most disappointingly the ''Arabian Nights''-inspired prologue), he has also inventively coupled its action to his own merry purposes. When Kate plays a prank on her better behaved and more marriageable younger sister, Bianca (Helen Hunt), in this ''Shrew,'' she uses the poor girl as the centerpiece of a balloon-popping marksmanship exhibition. Bianca's rival suitors draw guns at the saloon, and, to be sure in a work that invites slapstick, at least one Paduan gets a good dunking at the town water trough. In one lovely, wintry nocturnal scene, Petruchio's servant, Grumio (Jose Perez), recounts his master's and mistress's misadventures while his audience of cowpokes thaws out by a warm stove.

Mr. Antoon's inspiration seems to be the airiest of Hollywood westerns. His ''Shrew'' never quite becomes a parody like, say, ''Cat Ballou'' or ''Blazing Saddles,'' but it does evoke the bucolic interludes of John Ford movies, which themselves had a bawdy Elizabethan sense of rustic comedy. For the ''Shrew'' subplot, in which Bianca's many suitors, led by Lucentio (Graham Winton), all but trip over one another in a maze of disguised identities, Mr. Antoon has recruited comic actors who recall such grizzled, idiosyncratic Ford stock players as Strother Martin, Andy Devine and Woody Strode. Tom Mardirosian's deadpan Hortensio (who doubles as the town sheriff) and Robert Joy's cigar-chomping Tranio stand out among the younger generation of Paduan clowns, though even they are upstaged by a delightful pair of older pros: Mark Hammer as the creaky, unreconstructed skirt-chaser Gremio, and William Duff-Griffin as a tipsy, itinerant ham actor made up to resemble W. C. Fields at his most pink-cheeked and Dickensian.

Given the large number of slammable doors in Mr. Beatty's set, there are times when Mr. Antoon might have gone further with his farcical choreography. Some of the staging is static and some of the ludicrous vocal twangs wear out their welcome. But every time the whole stunt seems about to pall, Mr. Freeman and Ms. Ullman ride to the rescue, tongues and pistols ablazing. They not only fit in handily with the western scheme but they also help Mr. Antoon finesse the problematic sexual politics of a play that humorless contemporary audiences might regard as an endorsement of male supremacy and female submissiveness.

Mr. Freeman does everything brilliantly, whether he is falling on the floor in knockabout comic emulation of one of Ms. Ullman's temper tantrums or standing quietly in a soft spotlight to savor a reflective passage of verse or modeling an outlandish wedding costume that makes him look like a hybrid of Davy Crockett, Pancho Villa and Sitting Bull. He is one of those rare actors whose easeful command of his art seems to inspire a higher level of performance from everyone around him. His highest achievement here, though, is to rescue Petruchio from piggishness without any sacrifice of masculine strength or wit. His proud, intelligent shrew-tamer is genial and firm, not vindictive and cruel, even when roping in his bonny Kate with a lasso or, in one hilarious bit of business, good-naturedly countering her well-aimed volley of spit. One always believes that this Petruchio is out to ''kill a wife with kindness'' and ''curb her mad and headstrong humor'' rather than to brutalize and subjugate her.

While Ms. Ullman's Kate could use a few more notes, especially in the ill-tempered brawls preceding her wedding, her fierce presence and sardonic comic attack usually rivet the attention. Once Kate's transformation from swaggering malcontent to affectionate spouse does occur, the actress rises to the occasion. Her climactic speech championing wifely duties is delivered with just the right twinkle of irony and is capped by an ingeniously managed physical gag that allows Kate to have her man and her feminist independence, too.

The real point of the production, however, is stated earlier by Petruchio, who notes that ''where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.'' By the time Ms. Ullman ends up in Mr. Freeman's arms - in a romantic embrace both passionate and erotic - Mr. Antoon's ''Shrew'' hardly seems a war between the sexes, a shootout between heroes and villains. Kate and Petruchio are instead laughing together as equals, a true couple at last, excited to consummate their marriage (''Come, Kate, we'll to bed,'' says the text) and euphoric to share private jokes at an intimate remove from the rest of the world. If this ''Taming of the Shrew'' imparts the same lift as old-fashioned westerns, that's because Mr. Freeman and Ms. Ullman leave the audience with the unambiguous feeling that the good guys, man and woman alike, have won.